Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Our Metaphysical Times contributor and now local resident Oren Pierce who authors the Nowella and Threadbear stories, designs oracle cards, and offers himself as a private investigator, also offers what he calls Zen of Badmitten instruction, which is intensive, costly, and of goes on for years, but is simple at the outset and you can get started on your own. for whatever reason, Oren prefers the badmitten spelling to the normal badminton, at least until he gets a new business card. Oren was raised in extreme poverty on the fringes of the Fort Drum military reservation, living after the age of six behind the main shack in the chicken house, which was not all that different from the main shack, had no real toys, even balls and bats, but he and his siblings made do with what was lying around and what they could scavenge in the back yard dumps around the Reservation’s borders. They did come home with a pair of snow shoes, a common item up there in that era before snowmobiles, and using these as raquets, they played a primitive form, of badmitton, though they had never heard of the game, and they played with real birds instead of the conventional, feathered, shuttlecock.. If you were to take instruction in Zen badmitten you would, as with the bow in Zen of Archery learning, endure the whole first year of training without being allowed to even pick up the raquet. You would just be chasing birds, which you can start doing right now.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

I had a brilliant thought when I was spading a garlic patch this morning: one of those maculatre conceptions one could put into a post of a few crisp and country-fresh words …. but which would be my way into a few paragraphs developing that truth for your entertainment and edification: then I came back inside with that in mind, and SOMEONE close to me talked ... distracting me so I forgot the the whole thing. But when I get it back, you will be the next to know, and she will learn about it on Facebook.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Double tasking today: partly watching the rain advance on laptop radar, then getting up to watch it plinking into the frying pan we set on the deck to feed cats and measure rainfall.
It could rain all day and rain all night and it would not be enough to bring the well up enough that we could actually water the vegetables … except from the ponds, which are only slightly more than mere wetland now, and I don’t know if much less than a week of rain would be enough to get the orchard through a good fruiting.
It is a good thing we have social security and egg money, because …. after several years of disasterous late freezes… if we were depending on produce from our hundred trees, we would have been eating bark.

Then this season, we had the early warm temperatures again, but (so far) no freeze, although … with the present administration of climate … a freeze could happen anytime.
We had so many blooming Pear trees this season that I was afraid there would be more fruit than I could tend to; but I have only found a dozen or so trees that will have a full crop that I will need to thin and harvest.
I leave a few of the natural trees to grow tall in the steeple form that allows them to come up above the brush and pollinate the others through the wind.
But that didn’t suffice. It seems we really need another agent of pollination.
I saw a couple of honey bees when the Horse Chestnuts were flowering, which is not the swarm we need to do the job.but they are non native anyway; they are commonly trucked up here from florida, like other migrant laborers in season. We do have neighbors with their own hives, but we should be able to depend on our native bees anyway, even if they can’t be enslaved and don’t look like Disney cartoon characters.
So have the native American bees all been pushed to reservations, or what?

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

I don’t know why my grandson named the kitten “Stormy”, but now, a few years later, he looks like he has been through some violent weather. One day when he was still a kitten underfoot, I dropped a wet salmon filet into deep fat that splattered and burnt his ears, so now they are jagged, and, for years, had chronic head infections: sneezing bloody snot and developing continually oozing sores on the side of his head. He is partly or totally deaf, with a loud un-modulated voice. and despite, or along with all that he has bursts of wild energy, skittering across the floor and bouncing off the furniture on his way from feeding dish to litter box, Some of those symptoms have eased and Stormy was generally improving … then the Racoon attacked.

Hearing a strange cry, I jumped up and ran outside.
Near the bottom of the deck steps, a Racoon had our cat Stormy by a hind leg.

I had seen that little criminal the day before he grabbed Stormy: Hearing our top rooster Gerald honking his alarm, I jumped up, grabbed the loose table leg I keep by the door, and ran out to the deck.
I saw Swan the white hen, flying up the path between the garlic patch and the little trailer, followed by six or eight other hens and a coon about hen size who went after of the hens as she dodged under the trailer. He got her before she quite made it out the other side but by that time I was there with my table leg. they were just under the bumper of the trailer, and I couldn’t get a clear shot at him with the table leg, so I hit the added wooden bumper next to them, hit it pretty hard, so the Coon dropped the hen, which ran off, and I went all around the outside of the trailer on my hands and knees and my belly, growling and shouting, but I didn’t see the coon anywhere.

It rained the next night as we knew it would, and though we have evicted most of our least feral cats to sleep or stalk outside now that the weather is warm …. they know how to keep dry and they are somewhat nocturnal …. but we kept l Stormy inside because it seems sometimes that he does not know how to stay out of the rain, or that he doesn’t care if he is wet, as if he were just as numb as he is deaf.

Then came the day Stormy was so unbound that he bounced off the wall onto my side-table and I stopped him only as he was about to run across this keyboard, which is where I draw the line. I put him out.

Then, I heard a strange cry. I jumped up and ran outside.
where that small Racoon had our cat Stormy by a hind leg.

I got down the steps and grabbed the Coon around his neck, but it would not let go of Stormy.
I picked it up by the back legs and slammed him on the ground, but he was still attached to Stormy whom I didn’t want to slam on the ground too; so then I just stood on the Coon’s head…and pushed down hard … didn’t actually stomp, because of Stormy in those jaws … but the Coon let go, so I reached behind for a rock to bash the thing with, but then the little bastard was gone, and so was Stormy which, in itself, was at least a good sign.
After the Coon atttacked him I didn’t think we would see Stormy again uintil we smelled him rotting somewhere under the house, but he is now sleeping peacefully on the back rest of Geoergia’s chair.
I wonder how the coon fared after I stood on his head.
I am hopin he has learned a lesson: . If you mess with Dogs Plot Cats, a two-legged Oaf will stand on your head very hard. You are welcome to eat with the Cats and even the Chickens, even to be out and about in the daytime, when Coons should be asleep, but no eating family members.
Georgia has bandaged Stormy up, and he has been sleeping, eating, and pooping since now, at the bottom of the page, a few days on, he is still just sleeping, eating, and pooping. He has enough use of that coon bit leg that he can scratch himself behind his ragged right ear, and bound around the house between his cat perch and the litter pan, like the bat crazy cat he is.

Most of the time on most days, Dogs Plot is a peaecablle kingdom. Racoons, Possums, and Skunks often live right under the chicken house and feed together on our deck with a sort of family understanding.
But every Spring, Skunk, Woodxhuck, Fox, Bear, and Coon mothers in the woods around us evict their adolescent children who must then explore new territory… and something like this is likely to happen again next year.
.

Meanwhile we have an integrated, adult resident Coon , about the size of a Bear cub, who eats with the cats, and sleeps away the daytimes when the Chickens are about.
Yesterday down by the Asparagus patch I found a mess of feathers and the body of one of our several chickens we have allowed ourselves to name. Blanch, who had already over the years endured several attacks, most recently by fun-loving Labrador Retrievers on their own adolescent wander-about. I don’t know that the little coon I stomped on is responsible for the death of Blanch … looks more like the work of a weasel, as not much of her is gone. The Weasels, I can tell you about weasels and that includes Mink as well as the usual local Short tail Weasels, that can weasel through a hole about the size of a mouse.

But, as for Stormy: we bandaged hime bandage on for a few days after the last change and when we took it off yesterday, you could hardly see the damage. Except for the ears, of course.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Saturday, April 7, 2018

The problem with being a young writer is that to be a good writer you need to have developed enough wisdom that you actually have something to say.
One truth you often hear from the elders is that you are only as old as you feel; so I am pretty damn old now. When I was a young, learning writer, I decided that I would practice writing until I was old and experienced enough that I actually had something to say, so now, I do, so you may ask me about any question and I should be able to give you a brief and compelling answer.
Alternatively, you may believe that, as Robert Frost so cleverly put it, learning to write is simply a matter of learning how to have something to say. On the other hand, as Frost maybe learning to write is really more a matter of learning how to say something, anything, just so that you convey some relevant information, entertain or piss the reader off, or at least drag them with you all the way to the end.
If there are no more questions, I will have to be getting along now. Marshal? “What is the meaning of Lice.”
Bite me Marshal, you joker. Thanks for being here for us. Bye now.

About Me

I lived my first six years in Natural Bridge New, York, a village of about five hundred in the foot hills of the NW Adirondacks, and was joined there by my imaginary brother William shortly before we moved to Ithaca, in the Finger Lakes Region of central New York State. I studied language, truth, and fiction writing there at Cornell University, then taught briefly in Puerto Rico, then returned and taught writing at Cornell for two years, and for the eternity after that, have worked as an independent handy man, roofer, general contractor, and consultant, writing all the time, publishing some of the time, lately publishing mostly on my websites and my imaginary brother's blog..... linked over there on the page. I now live near Aurora, New York, (population also about five hundred, but no mink farmers, log rollers, or Talc miners)on a homestead with two dogs and twenty beloved chickens, more than half of them roosters. The big project here is top-grafting, a few acres of wild pear trees to convert them into a dozen different regular and new cultivars, while interplanting with other fruit trees and perenial crops, and keeping the roosters from clear-cutting the asparagus.